A survey reveals that half of the Latvian population trusts the Constitutional Court
On Thursday, 27 August, during the press conference held at the Constitutional Court, the President of the Constitutional Court Ineta Ziemele and the Director of the marketing and public opinion research centre SKDS Arnis Kaktiņš informed the public about the results of the first ever survey in which Latvian residents had been evaluating the Constitutional Court and various aspects of its work.
The press conference was opened by the SKDS Director Arnis Kaktiņš, who presented information on the survey and the data characterising the level of Latvian residents’ confidence in the judiciary. The data show that the Constitutional Court is that constitutional judiciary body which enjoys the greatest confidence of the public: 51% of the respondents said they “fully trusted” or “rather trusted” the Court. According to Arnis Kaktiņš, the data revealed the following tendency: the confidence in the Constitutional Court is more often expressed by respondents who are 18 to 35 years old, by residents with higher education, high income, as well as by people who speak Latvian at home. He also spoke about some typical phrases used by the respondents to affirm confidence or express distrust in the Constitutional Court.
The President of the Constitutional Court Ineta Ziemele provided an insight into the results of the survey, which reveal the level of awareness among the respondents on the Constitution of Latvia and the Constitutional Court of Latvia. She said that awareness was one of the factors contributing to confidence, therefore, it had been important to get a picture of it at this stage of the state’s and society’s development.
The survey results show that only 30% of the respondents are “well acquainted” with the Constitution or acquainted with it “in general, but not in detail”. A large part (54%) of the respondents admitted they “had heard but knew nothing more [about the Constitution]”, 14% said they had not heard anything about it, and for 4% it was “hard to say”. A similar pattern can be observed in the answers concerning the knowledge of the rights stemming from the Constitution, including the right to protect one’s rights in court.
From the data about the public awareness on the Constitutional Court, it can be seen that 23% of the respondents said they “knew well” about the Court or knew about it “in general, but not in detail”, 51% of the respondents admitted they “had heard but knew nothing more” about it, while 19% “had not heard” about it, and 7% answered it was “hard to say”. In characterising the public awareness on the functions of the Constitutional Court, it should be noted that 28% to 54% of the respondents chose correct answers when specifying the Court’s functions. And still, a large part of the respondents (47%) chose the answer stating that the Constitutional Court reviews the decisions of lower instance courts and overrules them if they are incompatible with the Constitution; the Constitutional Court has no such competence.
The survey data show that the respondents’ main source of information on the work of the Constitutional Court is Latvijas Televīzija [Latvian Television]: it was mentioned by 60% of those asked. 30% mentioned TV3, 27% – Facebook, 23% – Latvijas Radio, 21% – Tvnet.lv, 21% – Delfi.lv, and 27% mentioned other internet news portals.
As an important indicator in a rule-of-law state, Ineta Ziemele pointed out the residents’ opinions about the execution of the Constitutional Court’s judgments. 38% of those asked said that the Court’s judgments were “definitely executed” or “rather executed than not”, whereas a similar proportion – 35% – expressed the opinion that the judgments were “rather not executed” or “definitely not executed”. 27% admitted it was “hard to say”. Ineta Ziemele stressed that these indicators might be closely connected with the level of awareness, as it is not always voiced in the information space that particular amendments are made to regulations in order to comply with a Constitutional Court’s judgment. In view of the survey results, she spoke about the need for the addressees of the judgments to more actively and, probably, more accurately inform the public on how the judgments are executed.
Towards the end of the presentation, Arnis Kaktiņš explained the results concerning the residents’ overall evaluation of their possibilities to protect their rights in the judiciary bodies, particularly in the Constitutional Court. The data reveal that only 17% of the respondents consider the possibilities to protect rights in the Constitutional Court to be “absolutely sufficient” and “rather sufficient”, while 53% think that those possibilities are “rather insufficient” and “totally insufficient”, 30% of the respondents find it “hard to say”. Asked about the reasons why people comparatively rarely turn to the Constitutional Court, the respondents typically mentioned the following: lack of knowledge, lack of information, excessive complexity, financial aspects.
As part of the survey, the respondents were also asked about the main reason why laws were not always observed in Latvia. The majority (57%) said it was because “people do not know the laws”. 48% said that “people think the laws do not need to be observed and can be violated”, 45% believe that “the laws adopted are low quality”, while 44% think that “the laws are not applied or implemented correctly”. Only 15% of the respondents expressed the opinion that the reason for non-observance was the lack of financing for the correct enactment and implementation of laws.
Ineta Ziemele, answering the media representatives’ questions as to what the Constitutional Court’s response to the obtained data would be, said that for several years the Court had been implementing a specific communication and dialogue strategy, which it would continue to follow. Ziemele stressed that the Court’s main function was constitutional review and that it was the judgments that the public was expecting from it. The Court has no special administrative resources that would allow undertaking non-traditional functions on a larger scale. She suggested that also the media should therefore pay more attention to the topic of the rule-of-law state as a value and be active in informing the public about the work of the Constitutional Court. The Court also informed the media that school youth’s essay and drawing competition devoted to the Constitution would be announced in September this year, which would already be the fourth such competition held by the Court. 790 school students took part in it in the past three years.
Watch the video of the press conference.
The presentation about the survey is available here.
About the survey
The public opinion survey Views of the Latvian Public on the Constitutional Court of Latvia (“Latvijas iedzīvotāju uzskati par Satversmes tiesu”) was carried out by the research centre SKDS. Direct interviews took place in July this year at the respondents’ places of residence all over Latvia. 1009 respondents – permanent residents of Latvia aged 18 to 75 – were interviewed.